“Information is not knowledge,” sings the late, great Frank Zappa in “Packard Goose,” and “knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth.” He may be right, but there’s certainly a relationship between the three.

Zappa slipped the surly bonds of earth just as the Internet Age began, but keen observer and trenchant critic of censorship in all its forms that he was, I doubt he’d be surprised by these latest developments in government’s ongoing quest for total control of information. He pegs the government/information relationship earlier in the same song: “Keeping peoples dumb / Is where you’re coming from.”

If it were left to our politicians to determine what we were allowed to know, we’d each possess precisely two kinds of information:

First, the information necessary to our jobs — not because we need that information, but because if we’re not producing enough to keep ourselves alive and then some, there’s no wealth for them to seize and redistribute amongst themselves and their cronies.

Secondly, the information necessary to getting ourselves to the polling places every other year and checking the box affirming our “consent” to their humans-as-livestock management schemes.

Any information above and beyond those two items is not merely superfluous, it’s downright dangerous. Information might conceivably lead to knowledge. Knowledge might potentially inspire us to wisdom. Wisdom might open the doorway to truth. And truth, as Al Gore has helpfully informed us, is inconvenient (at least to people like Al Gore).

Government is the enemy of information, and therefore of truth. The enemy of truth is … well … the enemy.